They’ve been helpful and supportive of trying to find the right language in the bill … I always said if I could get Palo Alto and New York City on the same bill, I got something. We found that sweet spot in this particular bill.

Even Wikipedia claims Google support for CISPA, “Google has not taken a public position on the bill [27] but has shown previous support for it, and now says they support the idea but believe the bill needs some work”

Continued silence allows the wrong people to control the narrative and demoralizes opponents. There have been several articles about how no one showed up for the first round of blackouts and how passage is inevitable without Google and Wikipedia support and how that’s not going to happen. They also say not to worry because Senate does not care and Obama will veto it. This is the usual narrative of the rich and powerful: You little people are weak and helpless, don’t struggle because it will only waste your time.

Techrights firmly opposes CISPA and has written against it several times [2] Users, companies, government and the internet itself don’t have a “cybersecurity” problem, they have a problem with second rate, non free software from companies like Microsoft. CISPA makes the problem worse by giving the usual suspects power to censor and harass [2] people trying to fix things.

Education

Yes, schoolchildren in Chicago are victims, but not of their teachers. They are victims of a nationwide education “reform” movement geared to undermine teachers’ unions and shift public resources into private hands; they are victims of wave after wave of ill-conceived and failing policy “innovations” … The city’s current reform wave began in 2004 with Mayor Richard Daley’s Renaissance 2010—a massive program, funded in part by $90 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to transform the city’s schools by 2010. The strategy included firing and replacing entire staffs in low-income neighborhood schools, shutting down dozens of schools, and setting up charter schools. … Renaissance 2010 has done little to improve the educational performance of the city’s school system…

Someone asked me today while we were waiting to be seated for a filming of a debate regarding I-1240 (more on that later), why everything Bill Gates, or for that matter the Walton’s, fund, I am opposed to. Well, I’m not. I appreciate the money that Bill Gates and his wife spent to create the sculpture park in Seattle that faces the sound. … Unfortunately, Bill Gates knows nothing about public education.

This person makes the “Uncle Joe” mistake, thinking that the person giving her trouble has their best interest at heart rather than private gain.

Students at Walter L. Cohen in New Orleans began a walk out/protest on October 4th, 2012 when their teachers and administrators were dismissed and the announcement was made that Future Is Now Charter (Steven Barr, formerly of Green Dot in California, and Gideon Stein) would be taking over the governance of the school. … I’d say that the people of New Orleans have had their fill of charter schools.

Many New Orleans public schools were privatized in the wake of Katrina and the effort is ongoing. Here we see what happens where people can not effectively organize resistance.

The Walton’s and Bill Gates have just added more money to the privatization till for a total of $3M from Gates and $1.8M from the Walton’s to the Yes on Initiative 1240 campaign. This has truly become a battle of the 1% versus the rest of us.

This is what effective, local resistance looks like. We need national resistance to protect those without the resources to help themselves.

Please write a letter to President Obama and send it to Anthony Cody’s e-mail address listed below by Oct. 17th. Please invite everyone you know to write to Pres. Obama. We need thousands upon thousands of letters to make a difference for Public Education!

Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) is in a rush to now dumb down education in New Zealand even though New Zealand and Australia have higher international test scores than the US and the majority of other nations. KIPP is trying to worm their way into New Zealand using the same old phrasing such as “failing schools” and “ineffective teachers” and pushing the idea of hiring “unregistered” (cheap) staff to populate charter schools. … Fortunately in New Zealand they are having an open national debate on charter schools something that never happened in the United States where venture capitalists made up their minds about what was best for our students and in a stealth like fashion went about privatizing our public schools.

The key take away [of the Chicago teacher's strike]: rich white people who send their kids to private schools were the only group to oppose the teachers’ strike. In other words, the very group whose children will likely grow up to become the next generation of achievement gap warriors.

One person got up and said that she was willing to pay a state income tax to begin to subsidize what was needed by the community. … What is ironic about this is that the second wealthiest individual in the world and number one in the United States, according to Forbes, lives among us in Seattle and yet is not willing to pay his fair share of taxes to support the infrastructure that he used to create and maintain Microsoft including public education. On the other hand, Gates is paying millions of dollars in our state to lobby for charter schools which is the privatization of a public good.

Health/Nutrition

The $5 billion dollar initiative will provide free medicine to hundreds of millions of Indians who today go without access to health care, officials said Thursday. The new initiative will offer 348 types of medication to patients across the country that will not come from big pharma. Legislators in Delhi plan to utilize a network of government-funded hospitals and clinics to provide the medicine,

they examined results of a study conducted over a period of 16 years beginning in 1993, which looked at the eating habits of 52,000 Chinese residents of Singapore who have experienced a recent and sudden transition from traditional foods to Western-style fast food.

Defence/Police/Aggression

An examination of his belongings commissioned by Aljazeera TV and conducted by a highly respected Swiss scientific institute has confirmed that Arafat was poisoned with Polonium, a deadly radioactive substance that avoids detection unless one specifically looks for it. … I helped him to establish contact with the Israeli leadership, and especially with Yitzhak Rabin. This led to the 1993 Oslo agreement – which was killed by the assassination of Rabin. … Arafat was the man who was able to make peace with Israel, willing to do so, and – more important – to get his people, including the Islamists, to accept it.

A US official told Birgitta Jónsdóttir that the US has no wish to prosecute her or question her “involuntarily”, but there is evidence suggesting this is not true. Evidence that the US is looking to prosecute Julian Assange and others in Wikileaks. The US Army admits it is investigating the Bradley Manning Support Group.
This group was formed after Bradley Manning was arrested to provide him with moral and legal support. Since when is that a crime?

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

the Diet’s Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, rejected claims by the plant’s owner that the earthquake and tsunami ‘could not have been foreseen’ by saying: “Despite having a number of opportunities to take measures, regulatory agencies and TEPCO management deliberately postponed decisions, did not take action or took decisions that were convenient for themselves.”

Endocrine disruptors are linked to breast cancer, infertility, low sperm counts, genital deformities, early puberty and diabetes in humans and alarming mutations in wildlife. They are also suspected in the epidemic of behavior and learning problems in children which has coincided, many say, with wide endocrine disruptor use. … in April, research from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presented new evidence of the ability of endocrine disruptors–in this case the pesticide, chlorpyrifos (found in Dow’s pesticide Dursban) –to harm developing fetuses.

The Secretary of Agriculture would be required to grant a permit for the planting or cultivation of a genetically engineered crop, regardless of environmental impact. [thanks to a sleazy one liner in a 9,000 page bill]

post-spill communities contain mainly predatory and scavenger taxa alongside an abundance of juveniles. Based on this community analysis, our data suggest considerable (hidden) initial impacts across Gulf beaches may be ongoing, despite the disappearance of visible surface oil in the region.

So the world is now indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat — in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1% and the 99%. Not literal numbers, but the right picture. Now, the plutonomy is where the action is and it could continue like this. If it does, the historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. And the Occupy movement is the first real, major, popular reaction that could avert this. But it’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long, hard struggle. You don’t win victories tomorrow. You have to form the structures that will be sustained, that will go on through hard times and can win major victories.

It’s worth noting that the callous and extreme views expressed in this essay are quotations from a Citibank memo.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

posts are going out under your name because at some point in the past (in some cases in the distant past) you visited a page and clicked Like. Yes, you voluntarily Liked that page and made it part of your Facebook profile. If a Facebook friend wants to go through your list of Likes, they can learn that you like the NRA or PETA or a seemingly innocuous group that you probably didn’t realize was funded by Karl Rove’s political action committee. But I doubt that you expected that simple click to result in a flood of posts under your name months later. … when Facebook uses your name to promote a page to your friends, it doesn’t provide any indication to you that it has done so.

People should worry more about the power this gives Facebook to sway public opinion than they worry about their personal reputations.

ALEC’s positions on various education issues make it clear that the organization seeks to undermine public education by systematically defunding and ultimately destroying public education as we know it.

Yes, there’s much more.

Intellectual Monopolies

TPP

Perhaps the most controversial of these tools would be the setting up of a three attorney tribunal, with no checks on conflicts of interest, to judge foreign corporate complaints regarding government regulations in the countries they are setting up operations in. If, for instance, a foreign owned corporation argues it is losing profits because of its host nation’s overtime laws, this tribunal could rule that the country’s taxpayers owe that corporation compensation for this loss. Such costly judgments could result from any regulations including labor law, local environmental standards, financial rules, etc. In short, the TPP’s tribunal would act as the hammer of multi-national corporate interests above the power of the states’ governments they do business in

I agree that protectionism alone is a bad idea as a countermeasure. A better countermeasure is trade restrictions that guard people’s rights with tariffs against specific, oppressive policies.

A former intern accused of cyberstalking a Mineral Wells bat sanctuary and its president was ordered to pay about $6.1 million in damages Thursday for what a judge called egregious, malicious and intentional defamatory statements she spread across the Internet, court documents say. … The videos and statements, the suit said, were pervasive on the Internet, using “robots” to game Google and other search engines so the defamatory material would appear high in search results.

Security

These attacks are being distributed both via malicious web pages intended for Internet Explorer users and through Office documents. Users running Windows XP up to and including Windows 7 are known to be vulnerable.

they wanted the paper to change the font, the masthead and the paper could not be any name that began with a “T” (e.g. Occupied Chicago Times). When they realized how the company was coming after the paper, they decided to get legal representation.

Under cover of the night around twelve police cars stopped five journalists when they were heading back to where they are staying in Chicago during the NATO summit. All five have been covering protests against the NATO summit for the past few days. … Chicago PD took the journalists’ hard drives and slammed them against “running boards four or five times.” They took Pool’s alternate batteries and slammed them too. Content recorded by the journalists was deleted from Ustream. … The episode was not an isolated incident. @Ghostpickles and @Korgasm who have both been covering Occupy since the early days, reported being interrogated by CPD with others in the middle of the night. … The Chicago police, possibly with help from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI or other federal agencies, appear to be working off a list of “suspected” people or spaces where they must go “check in” on what is happening simply to ensure all is safe.

Deutsch called the investigation, targeting and raid of these activists “worse than entrapment.” According to the NLG, two police informants infiltrated the group. The NLG believes “they’re the ones who provoked this and they’re the ones,” who committed the “illegal activity” and had the “illegal materials.”
Additionally, they said the informants didn’t provide the materials and convince the activists to engage in some plot. The activists did not take the bait. The informants simply left the materials in the apartment ahead of the raid so the materials would be there for police to find.

supporters of three men arrested in a Wednesday night raid at the Bridgeport apartment of Occupy Chicago activists were gathering at the Cook County Criminal Courthouse at 26th and California for the arrestees’ noon bail hearing. Each was slapped with a bond of $1.5 million; Cook County States’ Attorney Anita Alvarez had originally asked for $5 million bonds for each, and trotted out a litany of charges deployed in the first-ever use of the state’s anti-terrorism statutes …the afternoon’s boisterous but peaceful protest marches marred by sweeping police violence. … Neither action was permitted, in keeping with Occupy Chicago’s standing opposition to the city’s ‘Sit Down & Shut Up” protest ordinances, which were tightened earlier this year to make it virtually impossible to stage permitted actions without at least a million dollars in insurance, massive ‘marshall’ presence, and a commitment to register all signs and banners with the authorities — draconian restrictions on free speech and civil liberties that the Occupy movement and its allies have refused to embrace. The police used batons, bikes and their fists to beat people and push protesters back repeatedly today, with medics reporting numerous injuries.

The details I have been able to gather from speaking to arrestees personally make it seem like the police have, in the past 48 hours, fabricated all of these details about having some investigation in progress. … the three activists remaining — Bryan Church, Jarred Chase, Brent Betterly — appear in the video posted of police threatening violence during the NATO summit. It now seems clear that police are charging them in retaliation for posting the video.

the Chicago police had “disappeared” activists. … The local news reporters and journalists have been utter cowards. Because the police would not admit the police carried out a raid, the media refused to “confirm” the story. They instead ran stories that communicated lawyers or protesters were alleging.

OVER 70 criminal cases against Occupy Portland activists remain in limbo following continued attempts by the Multnomah County District Attorney’s office to deprive defendants of the right to a jury trial and court-appointed legal counsel.
Over the past several months, prosecutors have specifically sought to avoid allowing defendants to exercise such rights by repeatedly changing the charges filed against them.

the austerity drive in Britain isn’t really about debt and deficits at all; it’s about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programs. And this is, of course, exactly the same thing that has been happening in America.

One of the casualties of Nokia’s latest cuts is Meltemi, the company’s effort to create a new Linux-based operating system for low-end smartphones. The project was aimed at offering smartphones at prices that neither Android or Windows Phone could easily reach…

Nokia is also exploring alternatives for another of its development environments, known as Qt, which today is used largely in embedded devices. “We’re fans of Qt, and we’ll continue to support it in the near term, but are being open about looking for opportunities which may be best for this developer framework,” Kerris said.

The Justice Department is conducting a wide-ranging antitrust investigation into whether cable companies are acting improperly to quash nascent competition from online video … investigators are taking a particularly close look at the data caps that pay-TV providers like Comcast and AT&T Inc. have used to deal with surging video traffic on the Internet. … Comcast fanned those fears in March, when it said that videos viewed on its own Xfinity app on Microsoft’s Xbox wouldn’t be counted against subscribers’ data caps in the same way as videos viewed using Netflix, Hulu or other apps

This article is from Fox News and is highly slanted towards the interests of monopolists. The only reason we are hearing about this is because Microsoft’s interests are clashing with those of Fox.

Civil Rights

Loud music with a disembodied voice rapping goofy lyrics while a half-dozen women in shorts dance in front of a roomful of bemused Norweigian software geeks, who have each paid about $1,500 to attend the three-day event. … The offending couplet: “I’m a computer gen-i-us / The words micro and soft don’t apply to my penis” On the teleprompter, genius is misspelled “genious” and the words “(or vagina)” are added below “penis” in the spirit of gender equality.

More monkey business from Microsoft. The cost of this kind of “training” is inevitably passed on in the cost of good sold and makes us all pay the Windows Tax.

over 70 percent of the people deported through S-COMM have never been convicted of a crime or have only minor offenses such as traffic violations. Furthermore, increases racial profiling and causes undocumented immigrants—who are more often the victims of crimes than the perpetrators—to be afraid of contacting police in an emergency situation.

The Supreme Court upheld the US government’s right to torture with impunity for “national security”.
It also abandoned the rights of prisoners in Guantanamo, even though most of them are acknowledged to have been imprisoned for no reason. Why should anyone hold the US government in higher esteem than the Chinese government?

Education Watch

“Over and over, we heard from our elected officials that this was the worst recession since the Great Depression, and they had no choice but to cut school funding,” he said. “We were told that once the economy improves, our funding would be restored. But this year, when they did have a choice, a very clear choice, they decided that tax cuts were more important than education.” … In at least 30 states, funding for K-12 education was lower in fiscal year 2012 than in 2008, despite growing student populations. …

05.31.12

What really stood out to me, though, was the reason open source is being deployed. While the top reason historically was lower costs, the market has been steadily maturing; last year’s survey put a freedom from vendor lock-in as the top reason for deployment. … Paradoxically, when a supplier tries to lock in its customers, they will try to leave; give them the freedom to do so, and they will most likely stay (all other things being equal).

Hardware

Security

The Windows allocator places the buffers at relatively predictable locations; and the Native Client process can directly control their size as well as certain object allocation ordering. So, this afforded quite a bit of control over exactly where an overwrite would occur in the GPU process.

I thought this would be intersting, but it was just another Windows story.

his home in Belize had just been raided by local law enforcement, he’d been rousted from the bed he shared with a 17 year old woman, naked and confused, to discover Belize’s Gang Suppression Unit at his gates.

Your AV money went south.

Defence/Police/Aggression

At stake may be the very definition of a ‘civilian’ in the modern battlefield. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos recently pressed US chief counter terrorism adviser John Brennan on his remarkable claim in June 2011 that the CIA had not killed ‘a single non-combatant in almost a year.’ … when we definitively showed, with the Sunday Times, that the CIA had been bombing rescuers and funeral-goers, it was suggested that we were ‘helping al Qaeda.’

The co-owner of a major Pentagon propaganda contractor publicly admitted Thursday that he was behind a series of websites used to discredit two USA TODAY journalists who had reported on the contractor. … Pentagon reporter Tom Vanden Brook noticed that someone registered the site tomvandenbrook.com. Twitter and Facebook accounts were also registered in his name, and a Wikipedia entry and discussion group postings misrepresented his reporting on the West Virginia Sago Mine disaster.

Looks like the usual smear job, including sock puppets, forum postings often of the most offensive character, much like we see here at Techrights. The contractor is sorry he got caught and embarrassed himself and his friends.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

In one town in the Fukushima area, the estimated thyroid doses to infants are within a dose band of 100 to 200 millisieverts (mSv), the preliminary report said. This level of radiation exposure could be associated with an increased likelihood of developing cancer.

That’s a significant dose, 10 to 20 R. There is not much else new or insightful in this article.

Anti-Trust

We have a similar problem with Windows RC that Mozilla and Google have. The only “classic” applications that will run on Windows RC are Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office. That’s quite unfair for LibreOffice, as if we would like to run on Windows 8, we would need to rewrite LibreOffice for Metro.

Windows RT is the same old thing from Microsoft, an intentionally crippled version designed to reduce the competitive threat to Intel. They are also pretending that business can’t function without Microsoft Office. Both of these strategies are badly outdated, but Microsoft is receiving deserved anti-trust review for their intentions.

“Nokia and Microsoft are colluding to raise the costs of mobile devices for consumers, creating patent trolls that side-step promises both companies have made. They should be held accountable, and we hope our complaint spurs others to look into these practices.”

Perhaps someone will complain about Microsoft’s “secure boot” too. Apologists have tried to say What Microsoft is doing is no worse than what Apple is doing but that is neither true nor an excuse. Apple’s scams only harm Apple’s users. Microsoft’s scam is general, harming all computer users. Both are crimes.

This is a major reversal. For many years now, free/open OSes have been by far the easiest to install on most hardware. For example, I have installed Ubuntu on a variety of machines by just sticking in a USB stick and turning them on. Because the OS and its apps are free, and because there are no finicky vendor relationships to manage, it Just Works. On some of those machines, installing a Windows OS fresh from a shrinkwrapped box was literally impossible — you had to order a special manufacturer’s version with all the right drivers … This is a tremor before an earthquake: the hardware vendors and the flagging proprietary software vendors of yesteryear are teaming up to limit competition from robust, elegant and free alternatives.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

The secret working group includes virtually all the major telecom and cable companies, whose representatives have been granted Government of Canada Secret level security clearance and signed non-disclosure agreements. The group is led by Bell Canada on the industry side and Public Safety for the government.

Censorship

For a month Pirate Pay’s technology protected the film “Vysotsky. Thanks to God, I’m alive,” (distributed by The Walt Disney Studios Sony Pictures Releasing company) with moderate success. …The end result was that 44,845 transfers were successfully stopped. How many downloads slipped through, and whether the downloaders didn’t simply try again later is unknown. Pirate Pay don’t disclose their exact rates but say they charge between $12,000 and $50,000 depending on the scope of the project. … it is not the first company to tackle BitTorrent piracy. The now defunct MediaDefender charged hundreds of thousands of dollars to attack BitTorrent trackers and upload fake torrent files.

the number one copyright holder requesting takedowns from Google search was… Microsoft. … either Marketly and Microsoft decide to leave up certain infringing content on Microsoft’s own search engine while taking it down from Google… or that Microsoft certainly isn’t that fast at doing removals. And yet, why don’t we hear the people who always bitch about Google complaining about Microsoft?

This data can be really personal, like if you ask Siri, “where is the nearest abortion clinic?” And once Voice Input Data and User Data is collected, Apple reserves the right to share it with “Apple’s partners who are providing related services to Apple.”

Apple promises to delete their copy of your data if you opt out of Siri but loss of voice commands does not prove they have stopped spying on you.

This is state assisted terrorism designed to make you afraid of sharing with your neighbors. The infiltrator is a liar and should not be trusted, but what’s creepy is that a civil violation is being treated as a criminal investigation like the drug wars.

When governments collect personal data, government employees frequently look at it for personal reasons. This evidence is from the UK, but it happens in the US too, which reaffirms that the only way to prevent abuse of data is not to collect it.

Civil Rights

The use that the Nazi regime made of identity documents to single out Jewish people and send them into concentration camps has been a powerful argument against introducing ID documents across the Channel.

We should demand banks do a better job before we surrender privacy. “Identity theft” is the result of poor software choices and a lack of due dilligence on their part.

The program is leading community members – including witnesses and victims of crime – to withhold information from the police for fear of deportation … The five largest detention contractors spent over $20 million lobbying Congress between 1999 and 2009, according to the National Immigration Forum. Their payback: over $5.5 million per day spent on immigration detention in 2011, an increase directly connected to the nationwide expansion of the detention-crazed S-COMM.

It’s distressing that states which understand these issues end up with laws that are almost as bad as Alabama or Arizona. Our democracy is sick and needs help.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

Your company NBC just up and blocked our video and claimed that we are copyright infringers! But we are not! We made it! And this is the video that you said you loved! Now, if you try to watch our video (and again this is the video that had nothing to do with you until you used it in your show without asking) on YouTube it’s just a big black sign that basically says, “the makers of this video stole this video from NBC, so you can’t watch it!” Jay, what in the hell is going on here?

Judge Chin gave the green light for three individual plaintiffs—Betty Miles, Joseph Goulden, and Jim Bouton—to represent the vastly larger class of “persons residing in the United States who hold a United States copyright interest in one or more Books reproduced by Google as part of its Library Project.”

The Copyright Guild is pretending to represent the interests of all authors when most authors disagree. Authors who disagree should write the judge and say so.

I will not completely go into detail about why I use Linux. Suffice it to say that if you are a blind Windows user, you are, for the most part, a target of big name companies who make extremely pricey software products (namely screen readers and screen magnifiers as well as other technologies) which allow you the “privilege” of using your computer system. … Ever installed a system with your eyes closed, literally? … As of right now, at least to my knowledge, one can completely install Debian (see the Debian accessibility page), Ubuntu, Vinux (a Ubuntu derivative designed for blind and visually impaired users), Trisquel and Arch Linux (via Chris Brannon’s TalkingArch ISO image).

Hardware

I currently own an HP Envy laptop. I like the machine overall, but typing on its island-style keyboard is a frustrating chore, one that inevitably triggers a string of typos that don’t occur when I use a classic keyboard.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

Chemicals in common household products may be behind the huge rise in cancers, diabetes and obesity, falling fertility, and an increased number of neurological development, the European Environment Agency (EEA) reported yesterday.

Finance

The stock option tax loophole is the only provision of the tax code that allows companies to deduct money for costs without actually spending any money. It allows Facebook to declare to shareholders and potential investors that their expenses remain low, while at the same time declaring to the IRS that those same shares cost them $5 billion and write those higher costs off as a tax deduction. To their shareholders and the stock market, Facebook will present itself as highly profitable, while their tax return will show the opposite.

The practice is pretty standard during IPOs, especially high-profile ones like Facebook. The big banks buy into a wave of selling as a way to prevent their customers from suffering big losses.
The syndicate of underwriters led by Morgan Stanley helped prop up shares after the Nasdaq Stock Market experienced technical problems processing trades.

Anti-Trust

sign this petition that pressures the relevant authorities in the US and EU (FTC, EU trade commission) to issue regulations that force hardware vendors to offer alternative OS software in order to break this monopoly for good!

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee’s official website.

Censorship

If you are using non free software, you might not really see what’s published here.

Civil Rights

The current US economy is built on ‘growing worker insecurity’ – people who are too busy and poor to make demands. … For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.

Lots of missed opportunities are listed, but the Occupy movement is reason to hope that people won’t let themselves be walked on.

The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival.

Intellectual Monopolies

“Passage of the AIA has provided an opportunity to restart long-stalled discussions with our foreign counterparts toward substantive harmonization that will help U.S. businesses succeed in the global business environment. … I don’t think there is any reason to believe that either copyright or patent lawsuits of the kind that we’re seeing in the so-called smartphone wars are a sign of stifling technological innovation. … [litigants] have intellectual property positions resulting from massive investments. They seek to enforce those positions, level the playing field in some way, and you have a dust-up like we’re seeing right now. I do not believe that it’s a sign that there’s anything at all wrong with the innovation environment in the U.S. In fact, I think it’s a byproduct of a very healthy overall innovation environment. These things happen. They sort themselves out.”

The US Patent Office is hopelessly corrupt, insane and self serving. This explanation begs the question of software as an invention worthy of a monopoly grant and the validity of the 600,000 patents on backlog. A claim to business methods is turned into a “position” which is good language if you think patents should be traded as a commodity, but that contradicts the protecting innovators excuse. People in other countries should take notice of the obvious fact that US Patents are used for US protectionism. People in the US should notice that this protectionism is mostly serving the interest of a few US companies at the expense of other US companies owned by less wealthy individuals. The net result is that the US market is a backwater of inferior goods.

“I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I’ve written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There’s no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You’re one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?”

In the metaphor of the romantic author, the works he creates are his children, born of his labor and genius. … We reflexively begin to believe that orphan works need the kind of protection that society provides to abandoned children. … What these works need are “special forces” that can free them from the constraints placed on them by the combination of the regulatory effects of copyright and the lack of a locatable owner who can grant permission to avoid the consequences of the regulation.

Science

The psychologists made this discovery by asking English-speaking Chinese people whether word pairs were related in meaning. Some of the word pairs were related in their Chinese translations. Although not consciously acknowledging a relation, measurements of electrical activity in the brain revealed that the bilingual participants were unconsciously translating the words. However, uncannily, this activity was not observed when the English words had a negative meaning.

The interesting details about my desktop setup are the peripherals. I like Model-M-style clicky keyboards (I’m typing on a Unicomp Model M). I prefer trackballs over mice and use a Logitech TrackMan. I like lots of vertical pixels for my Emacs window, so I’m rocking a Samsung SyncMaster 1100DF at 1800×1440 with 120dpi. My road machine is a Lenovo Thinkpad X60 … I like intricate music playing while I hack (Liquid Tension Experiment playing now).

Security

You may recall my posting yesterday (http://j.mp/Ku8pEd) where I suggested that the .secure TLD proposal is fundamentally flawed for many reasons. The CTO of the company involved contacted me this morning, pointing at their blog with more details: http://unhandled.com/ — After reviewing this information, which includes their proposals for a broader “domain policy framework,” I’m forced to stand by my earlier characterization. … The concept of .secure is essentially 180 degrees away from the model I believe we should be working towards. Rather than centralizing security, we need to be distributing it…

Defence/Police/Aggression

The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.”

It’s not too late. The government has yet to announce the amount of money BP owes for the damages caused by the disaster.

The US government blocked independent scientists, stolen samples and concealed the results of their own limited studies with lame excuses of safety and proper investigation. State and local governments, for the most part, were bought out with DHS and BP money for toys and advertising campaigns. Demand better!

Roosevelt’s administration came up with a simple solution: position limits. If you were not a participant in the food business – neither a farmer nor a baker – you could trade no more than 5,000 futures contracts. This prescription worked well, and endured until the late 1990s, when position limit exemptions were quietly granted to a number of large investment banks. Wall Street subsequently rushed into commodities, and the world is still reeling.

Anti-Trust

you don’t get those privileges (certain API access) unless you’re the default browser and I think that’s deeply unfair (a post for later,) but at least we’re able to build a competitive browser and ship it to Windows users on x86 chips. But on ARM chips, Microsoft gives IE access special APIs absolutely necessary for building a modern browser that it won’t give to other browsers

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

The rich and powerful already have a tremendous astroturf presence, most graphically revealed in the HB Garry/Aaron Barr email spill. Techrights has covered Microsoft’s disgusting astroturf effort for years.

Censorship

“Thus far, there have been only four challenges to the non-disclosure requirement,” Holder wrote, “and in two of the challenges, the FBI permitted the recipient to disclose the fact that an NSL was received.” … The FBI has sent out nearly 300,000 NSLs since 2000, about 50,000 of which have been sent out since the new policy for challenging NSL gag orders went into effect. Last year alone, the FBI sent out 16,511 NSLs requesting information pertaining to 7,201 U.S. persons.

… the plaintiff’s representative in the case – a professor Visser – offered commercial courses in anti-piracy, together with the judge, Chris Hensen. The plaintiff and judge were running a commercial enterprise together, one that had a direct bearing on the subject matter of the case. … It’s not just any course they do together, it’s part of the Dutch bar association’s official training program for lawyers.

a new kind of corporate oligopoly is emerging. Coupled with increasingly controlling activities by government, often in concert with corporate interests, the new choke points threaten to re-centralize media, or at least return control to a few dominant parties. … wired-line carriers believe that they should be able to decide what bits of information get delivered in what order and at what speed, if they get delivered at all. … The serious potential for problems with wired-line broadband is nothing next to the actual situation with mobile carriers. … The copyright industries have every intention of being another [chokepoint]. … Private companies are creating their own ecosystems, with minimal regulatory interference … If you create a journalism app to be sold in the iPhone or iPad marketplace, you explicitly give Apple the right to decide whether your journalism content is acceptable under the company’s vague guidelines. … Facebook is another potential threat to independent journalism. … journalists need to upgrade their own techniques and technology when it comes to protecting sources.

It is not surprising that one monopoly helps the other, as big publishers and telco helped Apple, because the monopolies are ultimately owned be the same few wealthy families that want to guard their relative position. What’s shameful is the willingness of our government to serve them at everyone else’s expense.

Privacy

What CISPA says as passed by the House of Representatives is any ISP, any website, any company that has some of your data in it can voluntarily hand it over to the government for a wide range of reasons …

if an Air Force drone accidentally spies on an American citizen, the Air Force will have three months to figure out if it was legally allowed to put that person under surveillance in the first place. … Acceptable surveillance includes flying drones over natural disasters; studying environmental changes; or keeping tabs above a domestic military base.

Spying on a person from miles away with a telescope is no accident, it takes pinpoint precision and advanced knowledge of the target’s location.

Civil Rights

Walker: “Well, we’re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. The first step is we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer. . .”

So there you have it, the attack on civil servants in Wisconsin was not motivated by budget it was politics and class warfare.

“The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy” he says. “What are you actually doing here?” he adds to the few women who are actually present in the room. … [more tastless stuff] … the moderator of the day finishes of by asking all (men) in the room to promise him that they will go home and say, “shut up bitch!”.

Dell is sorry they got caught laughing about discrimination against women in the workplace. It’s amazing how little attention this got a month ago compared to the “Virgin of Emacs.” That’s more evidence of an organized campaign around to smear RMS.

Education Watch

Nestlé Waters North America, the organization’s main sponsor, is the last entity that should be empowered to educate the public about responsible water use. When you consider the bottled water behemoth ‘s track record of hogging global water supplies and profiting from them, Project WET’s supposed mission is a slap in the face to any community that has had its water muscled away by Nestlé.

A federal appeals panel yesterday re-affirmed its September 2010 ruling that the U.S. Department of Education unlawfully diluted the standard of teacher owed every student in the country under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) when it issued a 2002 regulation classifying teachers in training as “highly qualified.”

Next year, the convention will be in Bellevue, a stone’s throw from Seattle. A decision with no regard for other regions attending. Bellevue is also more expensive than Seattle and farther away from SeaTac airport. I guess everyone can take a limo. (Or is it eat cake?) So how do we get the WSPTA into the 21st century and relevant again? How do we encourage and support parents, teachers and students to be involved? How does the WSPTA get the diversity of membership that it keeps attempting to obtain? First we do it with the technology that we have available and we take a look at how we handle our state and national elections. If this is to be a democratic process that is accessible to all, let’s make that happen.

Internet/Net Neutrality

Digital Handcuffs

Printed books let us do that. I couldn’t do it with most commercial ebooks; it’s not “allowed”. And if I felt like telling the publishers to take their evil rule and stuff it, the software in e-readers has digital restrictions management – malicious features that restrict reading, so it simply won’t allow it. And the books are encrypted in such a way to force you to use that malicious software. Many other habits that readers are accustomed to are “not allowed” for ebooks.

TPP

The crowd of negotiators and corporate representatives applauded, and “Haversall” continued: “I’d like to personally thank the negotiators for their relentless efforts. The TPP agreement is shaping up to be a fantastic way for us to maximize profits, regardless of what the public of this nation—or any other nation—thinks is right.” … Mr. Haversall confidently re-took the microphone and warmly invited Kirk to accept the award.

Kirk moved towards the stage, but federal agents blocked his path to protect him from further embarrassment. At that point, a dozen well-dressed “delegates” (local activists, some from Occupy Dallas) broke into ecstatic dance and chanted “TPP! TPP! TPP!” for several minutes until Dallas police arrived.

The look of panic on the corporate spokes drone in this video is almost as funny as US Trade representative Kirk’s “We came, we saw, we shopped”.

The defeat, even if only temporary, of SOPA and PIPA was surely one key factor in the sudden upswelling of protests against ACTA, which until that point had seemed almost certain to be ratified in the EU. The actions against SOPA and ACTA have led to renewed analysis of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP), currently being negotiated behind closed doors in Dallas.

Hardware

… the company needs to be careful to pick components that are supported well upstream. What would be ideal is if Dell started encouraging its hardware suppliers to open their drivers and merge them into the mainline kernel tree. That would be infinitely more constructive for advancing desktop Linux than any preinstallation scheme.

Anti-Trust

Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd … filed a class action suit against Finnish mobile giant Nokia yesterday claiming that the company made false and/or misleading statements to investors after it indicated that it believed the switch to the Windows Phone operating system “would reverse Nokia’s trends worldwide and dramatically improve its share of the U.S. market,” [but knew] that such a turnaround wouldn’t happen; the new Lumia 900 LTE model was glitchy and poorly accepted and its migration “not going as well as represented,” according to the complaint.

“Windows RT will have two environments, a Windows Classic environment and a Metro environment for apps. However, Windows on ARM prohibits any browser except for Internet Explorer from running in the privileged ‘Windows Classic’ environment.

Were it grounded in reality, Oracle’s claim that copyright law gives them proprietary control over any software that uses a particular functional API would be terrible for free software and programmers everywhere. It is an unethical and greedy interpretation created with the express purpose of subjugating as many computer users as possible, and is particularly bad in this context because it comes at a time when the sun has barely set on the free software community’s celebration of Java as a language newly suitable for use in the free world. Fortunately, the claim is not yet reality, and we hope Judge Alsup will keep it that way.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

The nakedness of the class bias in this case, however, was especially jarring: the size and significance of the protests were downplayed, reports of police brutality were largely ignored, and the movement was portrayed as violent and dangerous. Many of the most prominent US news outlets, such as The New York Times, practically ignored the protests altogether. These shameful distortions by the corporate press display the function of the media as an organ of the rule of “the 1 percent,” and reveal how threatened elites are by organized, direct action and democratic participation.

Internet/Net Neutrality

Digital Handcuffs

Jason Pontin, editor of MIT’s Tech Review, explains why his magazine deprecated its iPad app and went to “a simple RSS feed in a river of news,” and why it’s moving to “HTML5, so that a reader will see Web pages optimized for any device, whether a desktop or laptop computer, a tablet, or a smart phone.

This is a ridiculous escalation of rhetoric by scores of Orwellian US agencies. What else can we expect from groups with such unblushingly fascist emblems and an idiotic motto like, “Protection is our Trademark.”

Intellectual Monopolies

Microsoft’s years of bullying smaller companies into patent submission is about to come back and bite them in the butt. Today in court Google demanded $4 billion a year in patent fees for the Xbox 360 or stop selling it in the United States. … Google recently purchased Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in what a lot of analysts saw as a means for Google to go after Microsoft in retaliation for the shady business practices Microsoft has been guilty of for years.

This counter attack is defensive. Rather than validating the patent system, it shows how wasteful it is. I’m looking forward to a string of such lawsuits against every product Microsoft has.

Back in 2006, we noted that what remained of SGI had indicated that it planned to resurrect the company by going patent troll. However, we thought we’d avoided that ignoble result when SGI sold most of its assets to Rackable for a mere $25 million three years ago. Silly us for assuming those patents would just go away.
While Rackable changed its name to Silicon Graphics International… the original company actually retained the patents, and renamed itself Graphics Properties Holdings … In the last year alone it has sued Apple, HTC, LG, RIM, Samsung, Sony, Acer, ASUS, Panasonic, Sharp, Toshiba, Vizio and Motorola Mobility.

Copyrights

under current copyright law [1978], content creators can “terminate” the assignment of their copyright after 35 years and regain the copyright. This is a right that cannot be negotiated away or given to anyone but direct heirs … The judge in the case has pretty decisively ruled against the publishers and said that partial copyright owners still can exercise their termination rights…